Like most countries around the world, India entered 2009 worried about the impact of the global economic downturn on its own growth prospects. Anxiety about the economy was compounded by renewed concern about terrorism in the region, sparked by the vicious terrorist attacks in Mumbai (Bombay) in late November 2008. Despite these problems, the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), succeeded in returning to power in the general elections of May 2009, improving its seat tally in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. (SeeSidebar.) Paradoxically, a stronger ruling coalition might find itself under less pressure to perform, or at any rate to undertake difficult government and economic reforms. Although government reform was not a key issue in the elections, government failures lay at the root of many of India’s problems with law and order, civil strife, and insurgency.

The Economy

After an unprecedented five-year run of a nearly 9% average annual rate of growth, the Indian economy slowed to a growth rate of 7.1% in 2008–09 and was expected to record an even lower rate of 6.3–6.5% in 2009–10. This slowdown was only partly caused by the global downturn. An equally important factor was the poor monsoon rains in 2009, the weakest in more than 35 years, which had a negative impact on agricultural output.

The Indian banking and financial system had virtually no direct exposure to American subprime-mortgage assets or to the financial institutions in the U.S. that were at the heart of the crisis. The Indian central bank took care to ensure that Indian banks had limited “off-balance-sheet” activities and securitized assets and had adhered to the so-called Basel norms, standards set by the Bank for International Settlements for managing financial risk. The early prudent and risk-averse regulation of the financial system helped to limit the impact of the trans-Atlantic financial crisis on the Indian financial sector.

The economy was negatively affected, however, by various other channels. First, the downturn in global trade reduced export growth. Second, Indian corporations’ access to foreign commercial loans was curtailed, and this resulted in the cost of credit going up, since interest rates were higher in India. Finally, reduced portfolio investment in Indian equities by international institutional investors pushed Indian stock market indexes down.

To counter the impact of the slowdown, the government unveiled fiscal stimulus packages in late 2008 and in the first quarter of 2009. This additional public spending contributed to an increase in the government’s fiscal and budgetary deficits. A liberal fiscal policy along with insufficient monsoon rains and an expected downturn in agricultural production contributed to inflationary pressures. By the end of 2009, inflation had emerged as a major policy concern.

Foreign Policy

Managing relations with Pakistan in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai emerged as a major foreign-policy challenge in 2009. Equal attention had to be paid to India’s relations with the United States, where a new administration took charge, and with China. India officially accused Pakistan’s chief spy agency of having conspired to stage the terror attacks in Mumbai. The Indian government provided information to Pakistan showing links between the terrorists who attacked Mumbai and militants based in Pakistan, claiming the latter were “clients and creations” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Pakistan denied the charge, initially refusing to accept any link to the Mumbai attacks and later conceding that some “nonstate actors” based in Pakistan might have been involved in planning them. The action taken against those identified by India and the United States as coconspirators also became a contentious issue.

Partly to stem this deterioration in the bilateral relationship and partly to pick up the threads of an earlier dialogue with then president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met in July 2009 with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani on the sidelines of the Nonaligned Movement summit at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The joint statement issued after the meeting was criticized in India both by opposition political parties and by sections of the Congress Party (the leader of the ruling coalition) for being too soft on Pakistan and for bringing up, for the first time ever in such a joint statement, the issue of insurgency in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Pakistan had charged India with having aided Baloch rebels, while India maintained that the Baloch nationalist movement was an entirely homegrown resistance movement.

Even as Pakistan dominated the headlines, renewed differences between India and China on the border issue, especially regarding the status of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, caused some friction between the Asian giants. China continued to claim Arunachal Pradesh as its territory. India consistently rejected this claim, having held regular elections to the provincial government, including in October 2009. India’s plans to step up infrastructure development in the state met with strong Chinese disapproval on the board of the Asian Development Bank, which India had approached for a loan to fund this investment. Although China tried to block the loan, it was ultimately approved. India-China trade and business relations continued to flourish nonetheless; China emerged as India’s biggest trade partner, despite Indian allegations of dumping and nontransparent pricing of Chinese goods. India and China continued to work together in international forums, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the IMF, and tried to coordinate their positions in the negotiations on climate change.

The summit of the Group of 20, of which India was a member, emerged as a major global decision-making body in 2009; this was a high point of Indian diplomacy during the year. India remained concerned, however, about the slowing of the pace of its interaction with the United States under the administration of Pres. Barack Obama. While Prime Minister Singh enjoyed a cordial meeting with Obama during Singh’s state visit to the U.S. in late November, Obama’s preoccupations with domestic economic issues and U.S. relations with China and the Muslim world reduced India’s salience in U.S. foreign policy, compared with what it had been under his immediate predecessor, Pres. George W. Bush. India also concluded free-trade agreements with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and South Korea.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.